Juno: See It Before You’re Sick of Hearing About It

I knew I had to see Juno soon. Great cast, intelligent comedy, getting a lot of acclaim. Of course, that means you’re going to be so sick and tired of hearing about how great it is that when you finally do go see it, it’s going to annoy the crap out of you and won’t live up to the hype. Especially when it’s just a small, cooler-than-you story about a smart, reckless kid who gets knocked up. It’s not epic. It’s just cute.

I saw it as the second half of a one-two highbrow teen dramedy punch, the first being high school pharma-psychology flick Charlie Bartlett, which I’ll talk more about closer to its February release date, and the second being this here Best Picture contender. It seems like a weirder movie than it actually is, just because screenwriter Diablo Cody’s dialog is chock full of verbal flourishes right from the get-go. As soon as Juno yells “Silencio!” at Rainn Wilson right from the start, you have to get your head around the fact that nobody you know talks like this. The thing is, though, I heard the same complaint I heard about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and the Aaron Sorkin dialog. “Nobody really talks like that.” My response is “who cares? It’s the movies and/or the TeeVees! I wish people talked like that.” Everyone could use a boost in their snappy patter quotient.

So once you get your head around the fact that Ellen Page is going to be spouting goofball turns of phrase all the time, you can start to get into the film.

Juno is a smart, sardonic and abrasive 16-year-old, she gets knocked up because of a one-off thing with Bleeker (Michael Cera). Her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) convinces her to find adoptive parents, and so she does, determined that the kid’s going to grow up in a great home where love actually exists. Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) is dying to be a mother, while her husband Mark (Jason Bateman) is a musician who seems to have more in common with an irresponsible kid than he does with his wife.

It’s a strangely light-hearted take on teen pregnancy, in that it posits the whole process can be a relatively simple thing to deal with if you have reasonable, level-headed parents like J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, as well as none of that silly emotional conflict about whether or not to raise the kid yourself. One might say that Juno seems oddly detached from her impending parenthood, but A.) she’s oddly detached from most everything, and B.) a lot of teen mothers feel the same way about their accidental children. Yes, she’s preggers, but she still cares more deeply about who Paulie Bleeker is taking to the prom. At least Juno has the good sense to try and find a nice place for the kid instead of the dumpster.

Page is ridiculously adorable all the time, and she will likely look 16 when she’s 40.. She was cute as an X-Man and she’s alterna-cute in this film. Even when she’s being obnoxious or musically pretentious, she still seems to have an underlying joie de vivre that most smarty-art kids in movies seem to lack. Cera is his typical quiet-nerd self as the object of her affection that she refuses to admit to, Garner manages to avoid the maternally-obsessive clichés while dealing with her reluctant husband still struggling with his own maturity levels, and for once, the cool rock-and-roll guy who can still rap credibly with the teenyboppers comes off as the bad guy instead of the hero.

As for the Best Picture talk: I haven’t seen all the contenders yet, but I’m hard pressed to find a movie I had fewer issues with than this one. It has cynical overtones throughout, but it ends with such a surprising sweetness that you can relax, and rest assured that ironic detachment hasn’t ruined everything in this world just yet.